Daily Archives: August 5, 2009

If there’s one thing I’ve got to give coaches who are successful at recruiting credit for, it’s having the patience to deal with seventeen year-old kids with bloated egos.

Alas, we learn that Mark Richt screwed up the recruitment of uber-safety Eric Berry. At least according to Mr. Berry:

“I guess I just felt like Georgia thought they had me in the bag, and they didn’t even know about me and I was in their backyard,” Berry says. “I remember when I went on my recruiting visit, coach [Mark] Richt had my name and stats written on his hand. I guess he thought I didn’t see it or something, but I did.

“They were talking to me about playing wide receiver; they didn’t even know my position was safety and quarterback. That really made me upset. Coach Kiffin [who then was at USC], he came with Pete Carroll and the running backs coach and they knew all about me. And I was in Georgia’s backyard.

“But all the talk was about Caleb King [now a sophomore at Georgia]. I guess that’s why I always favored Tennessee. They always recruited me hard and let me know what I meant to them. That hurt my feelings, I’m not even going to lie. But I love Mark Richt, love his staff. Him and coach [Rodney] Garner, because they’re the ones that recruited me. They’re both good men. I was just like, ‘Dang.’ I just felt like you need to be in your backyard. I just felt like [they] needed to know a little something about me. A few more phone calls or something.”

Dang, indeed. I’m not comprehending what Georgia’s recruitment of a running back had to do with Berry’s love for Tennessee. And if we’re supposed to believe that Caleb King was a bigger factor in his decision than that his dad played at UT, why didn’t Berry go to USC? Makes no sense.

But then again, I’ve never noticed that Garner and Richt have had a problem multi-tasking the kids they recruit. Just a weird shot for Berry to take at this point in time, if you ask me.

Last year, when I started the Mumme Poll, I wasn’t sure where things would wind up. I was interested to see if I could find out a couple of things: (1) whether a viable college football poll could be constructed on the basis of approval voting and (2) what sort of efficiencies in the voting would result from a 12-team ballot that didn’t involve ranking each team individually.

My perception at season’s end was that we got positive results on both. Our rankings seemed as credible as any other poll’s, with the added benefit of reducing the perception of bias by means of approval voting. And with the average MP ballot taking around 30 minutes to put together, it looked to require a level of attention that a typical college football coach should be able to manage on his own.

The only downside to the experience was that we lost about half of our initial pool of voters (in large part, I suspect, because the Georgia season turned out to be disappointing) by the time the last ballots were cast. On the other hand, those that stayed on through the end enjoyed themselves tremendously, as did I.

So I was pretty convinced that I was going back to the well for more this year. That being said, I recognized that there were some shortcomings that would need to be addressed. A larger group of voters would reduce the chance for ties and would likely generate a longer list of top teams. A more diversified group of voters would reduce the perception of bias even further, and would also be a hedge against a discouraged group of voters dropping out due to apathy.

It’s also fair to recognize a limit with me as chief, cook and bottle washer of this joint. There’s only so much one person can do running a poll like the MP out of a standard WordPress blog like GTP, which means that there’s a limit on how many voters I can keep track of each week and how much attention I can generate with it.

And if I can get delusional with you for a minute, I want the Mumme Poll’s visibility raised for a reason. College football fans may argue vehemently about the BCS and playoffs, but if there’s one thing we’re all pretty much in agreement on (unless you’re Grant Teaff), it’s that the Coaches’ Poll is seriously flawed. It needs a fix badly. So, humor me in my fever dream that there’s a one-in-a-million chance that someday the Mumme Poll catches the right eyes and generates a useful debate on a higher level.

In order to start down that road, though, I recognized the need to make some changes on my end. It’s something I’ve been considering for the last couple of months or so, without much success. However, in the last week or so, spurred on by one of my commenters here, I was approached by the guys at the terrifically named 3rd Saturday in Blogtober with an offer I simply couldn’t refuse: a dedicated web site for the poll that they would host and a web interface/poll engine that they would construct to handle the voting.

Which means I’ve got some partners now. And since they know something about how these here interwebs work, that’s a plus. (Trust me on this.)

Speaking of which, please welcome one of your new Mumme Poll overlords:

Hello loyal Get the Picture readers. This is Tidefan from Third Saturday in Blogtober. I followed the Mumme Poll closely last season, and I’m excited to have the opportunity to partner with the good Senator on it this season. In particular, we at 3SiB will be providing a new interface for the poll to make voting easier and offer multiple ways in which you can be a part of the MP experiment. Senator Blutarsky will still provide his excellent analysis (and this season, so will we…the analysis, if not so much the excellence), but we’re hoping we can take the number-crunching burden and not just lighten it but explode it so that any level of detail the voters want will be transparent to them and immediately accessible. As the season goes on we’ll be adding new features as well, but we don’t want to give away too much too soon. In the next few weeks we’ll update you on how you can register as a voter and get a little more specific on the toys and tools we are planning. In the meantime, sit back, get excited and pay attention.

Really, this is all good. For one thing, since I can ditch the yellow legal pad and #2 pencil that served as my spreadsheet program last season in return for a poll engine that will assemble the results, there’s no reasonable limit on the number of participants we can accept as voters. If you want in, sign up. That’s all there is to it. For another, you get to junk the rather clunky way I had of collecting your votes by e-mail and replace it with what should be a much more user friendly method of casting your ballot each week. (Which means I can stop spending bandwidth chastising some of you for not getting your votes in on time.)

I’ve got plans for that freed-up time. It’ll be used to do more analysis and commentary related to the poll and polling in general. As Tidefan mentioned, two of my cohorts at 3SiB will be pitching in with this, as well. In fact, I’m going to get fairly ambitious with this, as I’m inviting several other bloggers with various allegiances and backgrounds to contribute to the MP blog commentary with us.

Needless to say, your contributions are still highly valued. I’m not sure what the final format will look like, but there will be some platform for your comments and observations.

There will be much more to come on this, obviously. In the meantime, any suggestions you have about what you’d like to see happen with this would be appreciated. Just stick ‘em in the comments section and we’ll take a look.

In case you can’t tell, I’m excited about this. Just to let you know how serious we are, we’ve even come up with a logo:

Here’s a good breakdown of the top 25 teams’ non-conference schedules. And, yeah, even in a field of crap, Ole Miss’ really stands out.

This stuff is growing extremely tiresome. In college football, there’s a reason the rich get richer: they nurture a product that we want to see. It’s not like the SEC, Big Ten or Big XII are trust fund beneficiaries sitting around idly clipping coupons.

Georgia – It’s all relative. Georgia was No. 1 to start out 2008 and came up with a disappointing 9-3 regular season. Now the spotlight is off, with all the attention being paid to Florida and Ole Miss, but don’t go to sleep on the loaded Dawgs and don’t just assume they’ll take any sort of a step back just because it lost Matthew Stafford and Knowshon Moreno to the NFL a year early. Of course, Georgia would likely be everyone’s preseason No. 2 team had Stafford and Moreno returned, but it’s not far off as is. The offensive line might be the best in America, the defense will be swarming, and the bevy of strong backs are good enough to carry the offense when the passing game isn’t working. There will be tests, the season opener at Oklahoma State should be the SEC’s best non-conference challenge, but no matter how that turns out, don’t be shocked if it’s Georgia, and not Florida, winning the SEC title.

I think it’s safe to say we won’t read anyone else in the general media who will come out quite as bullishly in the preseason about Georgia’s chances as that.

Quote Of The Day

“It's definitely different not knowing exactly who it's gonna be, but in a way, I feel like that's good,” he said. “One of my old coaches from Valdosta told me that competition is one of the best coaches. And I feel like, as well as each one of those three guys is performing, they're not gonna do anything but make each other better.” -- Jay Rome, The Red & Black, 3/25/15